In this article, I introduce an ecosystem reframing of health and disease experience to help us rethink, redesign and realise more health and greater wellbeing in the post-covid-19 era.
I start with a simple premise …
Our diverse experiences with health, illness and disease are by-products of our encounters in the world
Although disease and ill-health can sometimes be traced to our genetic imprint, our actual lived experience of health and disease predominantly arises from the mix of good and bad encounters we have in our social, material and natural world. These span four types:
Encounters with other people, in our families, with friends, in our communities and social groups and in the context of cultural norms, morals and expectations (social-cultural encounters)
Encounters in places and spaces, the natural and built environment, and with man-made and natural materials or objects such as foods, technologies, drugs and the media we consume (material-spatial encounters)
Both of these are easier to observe by a bystander or third party; they areexternal to our inner experience.
Third, encounters or interactions within the body, its movement and with external objects such as the food we digest and the air that we breathe (bodily-motor encounters)
Finally, our perception and cognition of these three domains of encounters, the knowledge we have of them, the ideas and meanings of them we have formed and their translation into action (perceptual-cognitive encounters)
Both these types of encounters are more internal to our inner experience and therefore harder to observe by a third party.
Together the four domains of encounters, having differing presence, quality, frequency and sometimes adversity, intersect and combine to form our unique subjectivities, our singular experiences in life and with health, illness and disease. Such experiences are formed from individual affects - temporal sensations, feeling states, impressions and intensities — that fuse to define a particular quality of experience such as a sense of joy or sadness, a sensation of pain, a sense of unwanted loneliness, a sense of hopelessness, a sense of dependency, fear, insecurity and so on.